[Editor's Note]Creativity within Anarchy vs. State-Organized Artiness

I was in Shanghai not long ago on a visit that included a quick jaunt through Tianzifang, the City God Temple area, and Xintiandi, and I came away marveling at the incredible pace of progress in mainland China.

Take Tianzifang, known as Shanghai's SoHo, for example. The Luwan District Government has converted the low, narrow shikumen townhouses that dominated the area into a stretch of "arty real estate": tiny workshops, stores, and foreign eateries just 160-320 square feet in area. There are hundreds of them, one after the other, all lovingly decorated in a bourgeois fashion. While none really stand out, neither are there any eyesores.

Tianzifang was originally privately developed. Chinese painter Chen Yifei, now deceased, moved into the area around 2000 and began to gradually develop it. The name "Tianzifang" itself was bestowed on the area in 2001 by painter Huang Yongyu (quoting from Zhuangzi to suggest the locale's artistic bent).

Later, the district government somehow managed to relocate more than 600 residents, replace them with several hundred shops cast from a similar mold, and set the shopkeepers in competition with one another.

I enjoyed a slightly fruit-flavored Yun-nan coffee and an interesting African tea in one of the area's small cafes. The little shop was packed with customers. While the young woman who owned it bustled about setting up fans to supplement the inadequate air conditioning and apologizing profusely for the heat, the patrons kept their cool and enjoyed themselves. No wonder people say that Tianzifang is the place to go to see and be seen; it was almost as if everyone was performing a role in a play.

The mainland has been able to create a vibrant, seemingly grassroots but thoroughly planned arts district in just 10 years. Can Taiwan pull off something similar?

Taiwan initiated its islandwide tourist night market program 14 years ago, but has a hard time taming its night markets. As described in this month's cover story, "Bustle, Not Romance: Taiwan's Night Market Culture," Taiwan's night markets are crowded, brimming with excitement, and overflowing with goods. They are also crude, dirty, chaotic, and just plain packed. They not only shape our collective memory, but also seemingly free us from social strictures and allow us to liberate our shared "primal desires."

Responding to the Tourism Bureau's recent Specialty Night Market Selection contest, blogger Migo unleashed a blistering attack on "elite food critics with money, leisure, and social standing." Migo also writes in the piece, which was very well received online:

"But what is the point of shopping at a night market? It's to feel the crowds, to eat unhealthy, calorie-laden fried chicken cutlets bigger than your face, to devour cheap, epic-sized slabs of sizzling teppanyaki steak, to consume oyster omelets at an outdoor stall even if you have to use one hand to hold up your umbrella, to suck down eel soup so hot it makes you sweat, and to stuff yourself on salad sandwiches. Night markets also give you a chance to scoop goldfish, play pinball, buy seven pairs of socks made in Taiwan for just NT$100, and have some of those braised snails that the adults always warned you away from. Smell them even once and their scent forever after recalls the fires of youth."

Migo's breathless writing certainly brings to mind the excitement and sense of desires soon to be fulfilled so characteristic of night markets. Night markets are post-modern pastiches combining products, food, and fun from past and present, local and imported. As someone who doesn't often visit night markets but nonetheless feels some vague excitement bubbling up inside when I do, I can relate to Migo's description.

Having said that, I also wonder a bit. Though Taiwan's night markets are a familiar part of my life, I felt more comfortable in Shanghai's Tianzifang. I think it's less a question of which is better, and more the fact that Taiwan has an excess of night markets and a dearth of Tianzifangs. Perhaps it's this imbalance that we should be worried about.